Shutting the door on the semester

Today's top task: pack up my office laptop and some books, set my office trash can outside the door, lock the door, and walk away. My goal is to avoid campus until Jan. 3, and I may even emulate a colleague and stop reading campus emails. 

Maybe. 

I don't know. I expect to hear from a few students embroiled in an academic dishonesty incident (word to the wise: if you must submit a classmate's paper, make sure to remove the classmate's name from the top), and we still have some unfinished business re: faculty governance (when I see a smoke-screen, I want to know what's being screened and why). But otherwise it would be really nice to shut the door and walk away both physically and mentally so as to free up some bandwidth for fun times ahead.

Like, for instance, our 40th anniversary, which we observed two days ago but we'll celebrate more fully next week when we take a road trip to St. Simon's Island, Georgia, where we spent the first part of our honeymoon. I don't know what the weather will look like in coastal Georgia next week, but it's got to be better than Ohio--and most of the family will be joining us, grandkids and all. Beaches! Bird sanctuaries! Board games! What's not to love?

And then there's Christmas, of course. The resident pastor now serves three churches, all of which have some sort of special activity this week, although only one, thankfully, has a Christmas Eve service. When Christmas falls on a Sunday the worship service tends to be fairly brief, but he'll still need to drive to all three churches and lead three services before noon on Christmas, and then he'll need to come home and sleep it off. So I think we're doing our celebrating on Saturday. 

Before then, though, I need to bake cookies, buy two more gifts (because Amazon failed to inform me that two major gifts were no longer available), wrap some things, and pack for our trip. Most importantly, though, I need to shed the excess mental baggage I've been carrying around thanks to all our campus controversies, and that starts with shutting the door. 

Gently, of course. I wouldn't even think of slamming the door and stomping off in a huff, tempting as that might be.

Here we are 40 years ago. My favorite wedding photo.